Shakespearean Baseball Sonnet #4

Unlovely thriftiness why do you spend
Stintingly on great free-agent players
When we fans continue to fill the stands
As well as many media layers?
Why, beauteous miser, why do you abuse
The bounteous largesse given you to give?
Profitable owner, why don't you use
That sum of sums so victories may live?
For you have traffic with owners alone,
Always deceiving your team's loyal fans
With those endless failed five-year plans.
And pennants again failing to be won,
The unused wealth is passed on to your heirs,
A new regime who will ignore fans' cares.


Shakespearean Baseball Sonnet #14

Not from the stats do I my judgement pluck,
At least not from reading those stats alone;
And dismiss alleged good or evil luck,
And show no bias toward the team from home.
And likewise disregard media hype,
For they fall in love with a certain type
And take only selected stats in mind
And ignore players of all other kind.
It's from my eyes my knowledge I derive,
And constant stars, in I read such art
As truth and beauty shall together thrive,
And can see what sets each of them apart.
And thus of this fact I prognosticate:
Stats are not needed to tell good from great.


Shakespearean Baseball Sonnet #18

Shall I compare the game to its play-by-play?
The game's more lovely and more temperate.
Rough winds do bring the rain delays of May
And play-by-play of an earlier date:
Stirring stories of yesterday's shine,
Cherished all the more in today's decline.
I'll take the game in person, on the airwaves,
Or in the creation myths of Abner Graves,
For the game of summer shall never fade
Nor lose possession of our affection;
Nor shall Death make the game one of his shades
By means of unnatural selection.
So long as men can breathe or eyes can see,
So long lives the game, giving joy to thee.


Shakespearean Baseball Sonnet #24

Mine eye hath played the umpire and hath called
The twenty-seventh batter safe in what
Was up to that moment a perfect game,
My making the call costing him his shot.
Because the pitcher that night had the skill
To achieve the dream, and that stellar play
Earlier in the ninth I can see still
As it temporarily saved the day.
I was sick later seeing the replay;
Though an honest mistake, it's now my fate
To be forever know for that one play,
The chance to correct it coming too late.
Mine eyes this well-trained want to grace the game,
Getting it right to leave players the fame.


Shakespearean Baseball Sonnet #35

No more be grieved at that which thou hast done:
Roses have thorns and silver fountains mud;
Anyone can lose a ball in the sun
Or fail to make the play he or she should.
All who have ever played have made errors;
You and I are not excepted from this.
Dwell too long on it, you bring the terrors
And your glove work be completely amiss;
And you may slide into a prolonged slump
Elsewhere: on the bases and at the plate,
As your mental game takes some lumps.
The team leader must be your advocate:
That you a forgetter needs must be
To not allow mistakes to rob from thee.


Shakespearean Baseball Sonnet #57

Being your slave what should I do but tend
Upon the hours and times of your desire?
I have no precious time at all to spend,
Nor services to do, till you require
My attention on a specific game,
Whether in person or being broadcast,
Or just reading of one of the great names
From the game's fateful and glorious past.
For at least six months of every year
Your news is mostly what I care to hear;
One day you will bid your servant adieu
And someone else will be there to love you.
Such a fool is love that in the game's will,
No matter what, I can rarely think ill.


Shakespearean Baseball Sonnet #66

Tired with all these, for restful death I cry
When scandal has made me a beggar born,
My bribe taking not treated with jollity,
Fans' purest faith unhappily forsworn,
And gilded honor shamefully misplaced
In the corruption of that past era;
And right perfection wrongfully disgraced
By fixing the outcome of the World Series.
I and the others would be Eight Men Out:
My expulsion justified, others' not.
Though acquitted when our case was tried
Baseball 'justice' our appeal denied.
Tired with all these, from these I would be gone,
Sure that, to die, I leave the game alone.


Shakespearean Baseball Sonnet #92

But do thy worst to steal thyself a base;
You can rest assured I will keep it mine,
Denying you the chance to safely race
To whichever base is next on the line.
The pitcher and I team to stop your wrongs;
He keeping you near the base on his end,
I by showing my throwing arm belongs
here in the bigs; on that you can depend.
Thou cannot vex us in taking a lead;
We will do things to disrupt your timing;
You won't know if your team's signs we can read,
Even if they have reason and rhyming.
But after all of that, give it a shot:
You may be successful, though I think not


Shakespearean Baseball Sonnet #123

No, time, thou shalt not boast that the game must change,
Though it does, but subtly, every year;
Past fans would find not much novel or strange
Despite the passing of a hundred years.
Each season is brief, and thus we admire
All that the game brings to us that is old,
Mixing it with the new that we require
In the collection of stories we're told.
That perfect balance on which we rely
Not putting the present before the past,
Nor allowing fogeyism to deny
That some present moments as well will last.
This I do vow, and this shall ever be:
I will be true, despite the scythe and thee.


Shakespearean Baseball Sonnet #127

In the old age black was not counted fair,
Or if it were, it bore another name
For sixty years of the game's history,
To its moguls' everlasting shame.
Why it changed when it did was no mystery:
One man, in his head visions of profits
Though he claimed to be guided by prophets
And not the time's blessed synergy
Nor by its political energy,
Decided to remove some of the shame
From the allegedly national game
(Though not deserving of all his fame).
And the post-war re-integration
Slowly spread to the rest of the nation.


Shakespearean Baseball Sonnet #139

O, call not me to justify the wrong
Done be generations of sportswriters
In their hijacking of the Hall of Fame
From the fans it's supposedly for
Their total lack of qualifications
For the power they've completely usurped.
And call not me to justify the wrong
Done too many times in too many years
By the cronyist Veteran's Committee:
For every wrong they've righted electing
An unjustly-overlooked great player
They've gone on and committed many more.
All of us who actually love the game
Know those who belong in the Hall of Fame.


Shakespearean Baseball Soliloquy #4

The quality of mercy is not strained;
It dropeth as the gentle rain from heaven
Upon the place beneath. It is twice blest:
It blesseth him that gives and him that takes.
'Tis mightiest in the mightiest; it becomes
The commissioner better than his staff;
Or it would if he used this temporal power,
This attribute of awe and majesty.
But none ever have: mercy is one quality
Second to economic imperative.
And justice is another one; consider this:
If you are seeking justice none of you
Should come to a sitting commissioner,
No matter who is sitting on the throne;
He will not overrule a predecessor,
No matter how egregious the decision.
For he serves at the pleasure of the true kings,
Merchants deserving of getting some sentence
He couldn't give them even if he wanted to,
And it always will be, world without end,
At least the world of baseball not extant.


Shakespearean Baseball Soliloquy #5

Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears;
I come to bury baseball, not to praise it.
The evil the game does lives after it;
The good is oft interred with its finish;
So let it be with baseball. Noble sportswriters
Hath told you the game has slowly died--
And sportswriters are honorable men--
I speak not to disprove what sportswriters say,
But here I am to speak what I do know.
You did love the game once, not without cause;
What cause withholds you then, to mourn for it?
O judgement, thou art fled to brutish beasts,
And men have lost their reason! Bear with me;
My heart is in the coffin there with baseball,
And I must pause till it come back to me.